This has happened to me so many times, starting nearly thirty years ago when I bought a Mac Plus just before the much better Mac SE was announced.

Been there, done that.

It will be interesting to see what Apple does if anything to the new Mac minis. It seems like there are endless possibilities since the overall design of the machine doesn't need to accommodate an optical drive anymore. The current design is basically just a leftover from the 2010 models.

It will be interesting to see what Apple does if anything to the new Mac minis. It seems like there are endless possibilities since the overall design of the machine doesn't need to accommodate an optical drive anymore. The current design is basically just a leftover from the 2010 models.

The Mac Mini, being Apple's red headed stepchild, is fortunate enough to get any updates at all. Apple really can't compete well in the consumer level, general purpose computer market, so it's almost a surprise when they do produce an occasional revision. Apple does get by with perceived ease of use, but here Linux narrows the gap nearly every day.

I'm sure that FireWire will disappear in the upcoming revision, so if FireWire is important to you then maybe you might want to get the current revision if you need a new machine.

Also, I'd say that there's an even chance of the traditional hard drive being dropped, perhaps except for a server model. So if you need lots of traditional disk storage at a reasonable price, then the current revision may also be better than the next.

I've already used my new Mac Mini's 800 Mbps FireWire interface. I connected the box to an older iMac with FireWire and re-installed Mac OS/X from scratch so that the new machine's disk would have a case-sensitive filesystem. This is 2014 and we are no longer in the Punch Card Days.

If I'd had another Mac with Thunderbolt, then I would have used that instead. But the operation would not have been much faster overall.

This is actually my third Mac mini. The first was a 1.83 GHz Core 2 Duo from 2007 which died after several years of faithful service. My second, a 2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo from 2009, is still running well 24/7 although I broke its IR receiver when I replaced a busted hard drive.

Toasty warm describes my new stock 2012 2.3 GHz Core i7 Mac Mini after it has been running all eight pseudo-cores at full steam doing 64 bit arithmetic for an extended period. The cooling fan is not noisy even though it spins at full speed when under a full load. Somehow I expect the fan to be the first thing to break and so I hope it won't be too difficult to replace.

Next week OWC will see an order from me for a 2x8 GB RAM upgrade. I can only hope that any additional thermal load incurred will not overtax the Mini's cooling system.

Running the same C++ application program on both the 2.3 GHz Mini and a 700 MHz Raspberry Pi (US$35) gets the same result, but the Mac Mini is 140 times faster. The Raspberry Pi runs about 10% faster than my 400 MHz PPC/G4 PowerMac from the year 2000.

I'm with you. I don't get it. Intel put the next gen Mini on a platter for Apple with the NUC. There are already aftermarket cases. All Apple would have to do is get their programmers to fix a few of the bugs the OSX86 guys are having trouble with porting OSX onto it, and then design some proprietary fancy aluminum heat sink case.

The only reasons I can think of are that:

1) Perhaps Apple would not be raking in enough profit margin with a NUC board built primarily by Intel?
2) Maybe Apple wants to use a new mini to spearhead a new generation of OSX built on their own in house chip?_________________Mac Mini C2D 1.83Ghz / 4GB / 500GB Scorpio

How about something sized like the new NUC from Intel? It would shrink the overall footprint, but keep with the mini's traditional design.

I'm with you. I don't get it. Intel put the next gen Mini on a platter for Apple with the NUC. There are already aftermarket cases. All Apple would have to do is get their programmers to fix a few of the bugs the OSX86 guys are having trouble with porting OSX onto it, and then design some proprietary fancy aluminum heat sink case.

I really don't know what Apple is up to with the Mini but the wait has been long enough now. However I believe they have a new concept coming.

Quote:

The only reasons I can think of are that:

1) Perhaps Apple would not be raking in enough profit margin with a NUC board built primarily by Intel?

The NUCs for the most part are pathetic performers though Broadwell could change that drastically. Many of them are ATOM powered and frankly AMD makes better low end chips.

Quote:

2) Maybe Apple wants to use a new mini to spearhead a new generation of OSX built on their own in house chip?

I think this is a real possibility. Intel based Mini gets dropped in favor of a advanced AppleTV like device. That would leave a huge gap in their desktop lineup which could easily be filled by a low cost Mac built on the Mac Pro chassis.

This has happened to me so many times, starting nearly thirty years ago when I bought a Mac Plus just before the much better Mac SE was announced.

Yikes! You bring up memories from the past. I did love my old Mac Plus, kept it for a very long time. Unfortunately Apples troubles with building a viable PC and operating systems caused me to make a big detour into Linux for years. Up until 2008 really.